This application claims benefit of priority of patent application Ser. No. 12/832,728, filed on Jul. 8, 2010, which is herein incorporated by reference.
The present invention relates generally to a computer implemented method, data processing system, and computer program product for conducting virtual presentations through networked computers. More specifically, the present invention relates to receiving feedback, at a hosting computer, concerning the progress of rendering updated presentation data to participant displays.
Presentation of computer outputs to additional computers on a network has been available for ten or more years. The data processing systems that generate the presentations or participate in them rely on software generally called screen sharing applications. A screen sharing service example is the IBM® Lotus® Sametime® plugin called InstantShare. IBM, Lotus and Sametime are trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both. For example, the presenter can present an entire screen to a distant user for real-time or near real-time viewing.
Currently, no screen sharing software permits a subset of participants to be given privileges to see presenter-selected parts of the screen not available to another subset of participants. A participant is a computer that is receiving updates to a presentation. In addition, the presenter is not provided feedback concerning how many participants have received an up-to-date view of the presenter's current screen.